Are you still Design Thinking or are you Design Sprinting?

How to innovate at digital speed.

The value of Design Thinking

Over the past decade, Design Thinking has become the leading innovation methodology, and the increase in its adoption has enabled us to investigate the benefits of Design Thinking for corporate innovation.

According to the Design Value Index created by the Design Management Institute, design-led companies have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past ten years by an extraordinary 211 percent.

After three years of using Design Thinking, a leading multinational IT company assessed the financial impact of its Design Thinking practice and calculated that it had achieved a 300 percent ROI.

Using Design Thinking, the company:

• Cut costs by accelerating projects by as much as 75 percent, resulting in savings of US$20.6 million
• Reduced risk and increased project profitability (US$18.6 million)
• Streamlined organizational process efficiency (US$9.2 million)

Besides the financial metrics, they also observed additional benefits, which:

• Encouraged an empowered, engaged, and happy workforce
• Enhanced KPIs such as UI, UX, CX, NPS, and brand energy
• Perfected internal processes for HR, sales, and beyond

Jeanne Liedtka of Darden Business School examined 22 organizations investigating what organizations do when they say they utilize Design Thinking, how these observed practices impact the innovation process, and the innovation outcomes.

She concluded that using Design Thinking leads to:

• Improved quality of choices and decisions made in the process
• Reduced risks and cost of failure
• Enhanced likelihood of successful implementation
• Increased adaptability
• Creation of new capabilities and skills among the people who used Design Thinking-and precisely the skills that are often said to be key nowadays and in the future: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

McKinsey published a study on the value of design in business, concluding that strong Design Thinking performers grow their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers.

With this increasing amount of quantitative proof, I think we can all agree that the proper adoption of Design Thinking can lead to tremendous results.

(Please note that I wrote “proper adoption”. Watching a TEDtalk on Design Thinking and then having a go at it will probably not lead to the desired results. Although it looks that simple, it is not. Proper initial training and support are crucial!)

Sprinting when Designing? The Benefits of Design Sprints.

Ok, so we all understand the value of design, but why do we now have to sprint while doing it?

Google Ventures, the inventors of the Design Sprint, put it this way:

“We’re investors, and we succeed when our companies succeed. To help them solve problems quickly and be self-sufficient, we’re optimized our sprint process to deliver the best results in the least time… we short-cut the endless-debate cycle and compress months into a single week.”

Benefits for the team:

• Team is empowered
• A practical way of putting Design Thinking into practice
• A clear process for creativity and innovation
• Tackles high uncertainty issues (which can usually lead to much debate) quickly

Benefits for the project:

• Increased speed and efficiency, which means quickly learning about the desirability of an idea without having to build and launch a minimum viable product
• Clear direction and focus of a new project based on alignment of the key problem and reliable customer feedback
• Buy-in and alignment from key stakeholders, as you only focus on projects that have proven early value creation

Benefits for the company:

• Reduced budget: The initial investment is low as the idea is tested quickly, without having to pour a lot of time and money into building a prototype
• Lower risk: Kills non-promising and pet projects fast based on valuable data from potential customers/users, instead of based on opinion, with an initial investment of only one week
• Good way to get started rapidly with Design Thinking and quickly enjoy some of the benefits outlined above
• Champions new ways and models of work that embody speed, agility, and customer-centricity

What’s a Design Sprint?

In Sprint, the book that introduced Design Sprints to the public, the Sprint is defined as follows:

“The Sprint is GV’s unique five-day process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more — packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.”

How does a Design Sprint work?

A typical Sprint runs over five days:

• Monday: Define and unpack the problem to solve
• Tuesday: Generate ideas to solve the problem
• Wednesday: Decide which ideas to test
• Thursday: Build a prototype to give to your users for testing
• Friday: Validate your assumptions and get feedback

These days and the activities within them are highly structured and time-boxed (so time is not wasted), and have been tested to deliver the results you need to move quickly from problem to idea, to prototype, and to validation.

Now, ideally, it’s five days, but there are also ways to compact it or spread it out.

As a response to the “Whaaaat?…? Five days…? Are you crazy?” (you guessed it already: especially corporates complain about not having five days to solve their most critical challenges ;-)), four-day variations have emerged.

(Before you dismiss the idea of investing five full days into a workshop with several people as being impossible, ask yourself this: Would you rather spend five days for fast impact or have your project drag along for several months without any progress?)

Some teams condense problem definition and ideation into one day, whereas others stay one day with the problem and then combine ideation and decision-making into the next day. Both ways work. In my experience, both of them need a little more and a different kind of preparation.

Which leads us to the Corporate Design Sprint.

Isn’t this just for startups? No! How to do Corporate Design Sprints.

Like so often these days, new ways of working are first created by startups. But corporates need to simply adjust the principles and practices of Design Sprints to a corporate setting.

When implementing Design Sprints in a corporate setting, typical challenges are:

• Often a lack of customer-centric culture, but instead a very technology and product-driven way of thinking: “We know better anyhow.”
• Deeply stuck in daily business, which makes it hard to imagine new ways of working and new ideas for solving problems: “We don’t have time for this.”
• Waterfall, tightly planned workshops, planning before doing culture: “We need a business case first.”
• Siloed functions: “Not invented here.”

So, how can we keep the benefits of the Sprint, while coping with the particularities of a corporate environment?

First, consider when to do a Sprint and when not to. Suitable contexts and challenges are:

• You’re stuck: Maybe you’ve tried your usual way, but you can’t move forward
• Time pressure: Time to market is critical, and you don’t have months to discuss
• High uncertainty: You don’t know whether it’s a good idea anyhow, and there is no data available that could tell you. Or, you don’t know how to get started or what approach to take
• High risk: The project seems unsafe to try, and you need to minimize risk
• New problem: You’ve never faced such a problem before and don’t know how to tackle it. There’s no evident expertise or an obvious solution
• Broad and narrow: Your challenge should be broad enough to allow for creativity and narrow enough to go deep-no boiling the ocean[A3]
• It’s a human challenge: It’s not a purely technological challenge à la “we need to make this smaller, lighter, faster, thinner, stronger, etc.”. Sprints are for problems that involve a human dimension and need customer/user feedback, and the uncertainty involves how customers/users/employees will react to a solution.

Now, this focus on new, unconventional challenges, with a high level of uncertainty will increase the natural tendency for planning, which we need to account for in our Corporate Design Sprint approach. What does that mean?

The Corporate Design Sprint process

We use the following approach to adapt Design Sprints to larger and more traditional organizations. A single sprint à la “come in on Monday and we’ll start working” has proven to be unhelpful. To allow for the needs as mentioned earlier for planning and uncertainty reduction, we start with preparation work, followed by the actual Design Sprint, which we adapted to a corporate context, and we close the process with a Next Steps Sprint.

Prepare

First, we prepare upfront and align with key stakeholders on the particular problem to solve. We align on the scope of the actual Sprint, define the team needed to solve this specific problem, and we collect and prepare some input upfront. This creates a certain level of comfort among participants and management. In addition, this preparation ensures that you’re actually working on a problem that everybody has agreed is a problem worth solving and that the right people are in the room.

Making sure the right people are in the room may require talking to some initial people before finding the core team, as in larger corporations, they will probably know somebody else you should also invite to contribute.

If possible, we do this as a one-week Sprint that might look like in figure 1 below (this one was on a process related challenge). We call this the Preparation Sprint.

The Design Sprint

The upfront preparation and problem framing allow us to bring initial data into the room. Hence, we condense understanding the problem and ideation into one day.

To mitigate the resistance towards a five-day workshop, we engage the larger group of stakeholders only during the first two days, and work the other two days with a smaller core project team, while, finally at the end of the week aligning with internal stakeholders again. In this particular example, we worked on an internal process, i.e., the “customers” were all internal users, and they were involved throughout the actual Sprint and the Preparation Sprint.

The general structure we use is:

• Monday: Understand the problem and ideate solutions
• Tuesday: Decide
• Wednesday and Thursday morning: Prototype (with a smaller core team)
• Thursday afternoon: Validate with customers/users
• Friday morning: Validate the proposed solution with management
• Friday afternoon: Align on deliverables of the Next Steps Sprint based on validation feedback and retrospection.

The Next Steps Sprint

The process closes with a Sprint to define the next actions:

• Monday: Review the outcomes of the Design Sprint and ideate on ways forward
• Tuesday: Decide and curate a backlog of actions
• Wednesday: Prototype a high-level roadmap
• Thursday: Validate with key stakeholders and iterate if necessary
• Friday: Validate with management and define immediate next action steps.

Conclusion

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Design Thinking has proven to be so powerful because (1) it combines the view of the customer, with what is technically possible, and the needs of the business, and (2) because it relies on a non-linear process, which de-risks and reduces the development and execution time of new ideas.

The Design Sprint approach enables project teams to validate ideas quickly, ensuring that larger investments are only carried out based on sound feedback from potential customers.

The Corporate Design Sprint process put forward here adjusts the concept to a corporate setting taking into account the peculiarities of such a context, which allows corporates to innovate with increased speed and agility, all the while minimizing its risks.